Entering the Maori Worldview

Indigenous people are our guides to an expansive, welcoming future that will allow our children to flourish. In order for Indigenous wisdom streams to be of service to us, we have to know how to hear them. To absorb traditional insight requires us to shift our worldviews and our ways of relating. This is both corrective and healing. This book helps you walk on a bridge toward unity with all peoples. Fundamental to creating the world we want our children to inherit is the inclusivity and unity that all traditional cultures espouse. As an exponent of this, Maata Wharehoka, the inspiration and central subject of this book, has a vocation of peacemaking. Maata speaks to us from the birthplace of nonviolence, the iconic Parihaka marae, or meeting grounds of the community. She is the living voice of Parihaka’s mission of peace.

In these pages we experience Maata’s catalyzing influence, love, strength, and creativity as she restores and regenerates Māori culture for her people and the world. She causes us to reflect on how we can ignite our own living experience of belonging and connection. It is only by feeling our kinship with the natural world and with each other that we have any hope of solving the metacrisis conditions that disconnection created. Maata shows us the way.

That way is mapped by the cultivation of cultural sensitivity. This is not just about being polite, or deferential. It is a shift in consciousness and a change of heart. When I first began interviewing Maata and her family and peers, I was an outsider looking in. I was listening and watching. Somewhere, sometime between then and now, I have entered the spaces that I was documenting from the outside. Though I am clearly not Māori by birth, it is as if I have gotten new lenses for my eyes, and I am beginning to see differently, as if from within the world rather than peering at it.

This is why I have included queries at the end of each chapter, inviting readers to take into their lives the places they inhabit and the relationships they have, considerations of cultural sovereignty, and why it is important to stand for values in this world we share. We evolve culture by how we regard and transmit it. If we allow our values to be torn asunder and trashed, then we are party to the disintegration of society and civilization. But if we stand for values that link us to a lineage of values, and evolve those values to adapt to current needs, never losing sight of integrity, then we can claim a legacy worth transmitting.

Maata Wharehoka is the model of holding true to values that come from deeply embodied lineage. She protects those values. The Te Reo Māori word manaaki applies here. Manaaki means to protect, to show respect, to take care. The time I have spent at Parihaka, where Maata lives, has infused me with manaaki. The transmission came not only from Maata herself but from the very air, the smells, the harakeke plants, and most of all, the whenua of Parihaka.

As you read this book, as you attune to who Maata is and what Parihaka emanates, and the leadership of Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi, the originators of nonviolent protest, bear in your mind and heart the spirit of manaaki, the spirit of protection. I invite you to not only respect what is transmitted here but also to protect the values and intentions that I have done my best to relay and that have become part of me as a result of my experience and relationship with Maata Wharehoka and her family.

Entering the Māori worldview is like stepping into a verdant landscape in which humans and plants, animals, the land, the wind, the rain, the mountains, and the rivers, are united, blended, operating from the same intentionality, the same source. This may sound like it is a step into a distant, or even a fantasy, past, but it is actually a view of the future.

Te Ao Māori, the Māori worldview, is wisdom teaching for the world. It will be our salvation to enter the realm where life- and nature-informed consciousness rule every action, every perception, every choice. This is the model of connected living that Maata Wharehoka has been sustaining and regenerating. She is the stamina, the resilience, the adaptability, the inventiveness, and the pragmatic utility of the harakeke. Harakeke is medicinal. It is thick, yet pliable, and by human hands it is woven into clothing, baskets, mats, and art. It can be made so thin that it can be threaded through a needle.

In December 2023, as horrific tragedies continued to unfold after the events of October 7, Maata and I grieved together. Her sense of unity with the suffering of all people comes directly from the lineage of her people and of Te Whiti o Rongomai who predicted that “the nations of the world will be as one.” She and I, as mothers and grandmothers, keened for the massacred children, and dedicated ourselves to nonviolence and peace as we sat together in her whare at Parihaka.

I take full responsibility for the errors in this book and for my own ignorance in regard to any misrepresentations or confusion. It is an enormous privilege to be trusted to receive what the Wharehoka family and Maata’s friends and peers have shared with me.

It is my intention that this book serves the unity prophesized by Te Whiti o Rongomai. As he was accurate in all his other predictions, I hold on to the accuracy of this one.

Introducing Maata Wharehoka

At the Parihaka marae in the shadow of Mount Taranaki, above the verdant sea cliffs of the North Island of Aotearoa (New Zealand), bordering the Tasman Sea, the thick fronds of the harakeke clap in the gusty wind like an audience applauding. The bright coral ngutukaka flowers, the pristine mānuka blossoms and kōkohurangi (tree daisies) dance around the harakeke, as if they were children, bowing to a queen mother.

At the top of a winding road, surrounded by pasture meadows and nearly forty-five kilometers from New Plymouth, the nearest Pākehā town and regional center is Maata’s home. Like the harakeke outside her door, she reigns there, and her mokopuna (grandchildren) along with her daughters and sons, are her mānuka blossoms. Maata has the fortitude, the sturdiness, and the intention to serve her people that is just like the hardy harakeke, also native to Aotearoa, and of which she is a master weaver.

The rooms and walls of her whare (home) hold all the chapters in the compelling saga of Maata’s tireless devotion to her whānau (family), to Te Ao Māori (the Māori world view) and to Parihaka, about which you will hear a great deal in this book. When you enter the house, the first room is the spacious lounge, the wharenui, often filled with the play of children. The kitchen is the belly of the house, where food is shared generously with all who enter, including visitors, volunteers, interviewers like me, and community members.

And then there is Maata’s room, the place where she rests, sleeps, reads, writes, creates art, and where Kahu Whakatere, the rite of passage for death and dying, was reborn. This is the room where Maata’s sister Millie and Maata’s husband, Te Ru, died, and through their deaths, contributed to the emergence of the cultural reclamation that is Kahu Whakatere. An entire chapter in this book is devoted to this because Kahu Whakatere encompasses every aspect of Maata’s legacy.

In the days of the third and final cycle of her life, Maata Wharehoka, despite illness and pain, is filled with the dynamic resilience of spirit, the life force or mana that was obvious to others in her childhood and her youth, indeed throughout her life, and that radiates from her even now.

Maata was not born in Parihaka, but she will die there, in that same room where her sister and husband died, wrapped in garments woven of harakeke. Her body will be at ease on a soft mat, still redolent with the earthy, fresh scent of the plants from which it was made, and woven by her family and her community. Her tenacious body, with all its accumulated struggles and burdens, its memories of mischief and defiance, of love and rebellion, will let go and be received into the land that is her source, her identity. She will be welcomed into the cool, protective shade of her mountain, Taranaki.